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Album Review:
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Friday, September 14, 2012

Album Review: Hexvessel - No Holier Temple

Hexvessel love trees. It’s quite clear that the “Temple” in
the title of their sophomore album is referring to all things nature
and, in particular, the life cycles of those tall, knotty skyscrapers
themselves. Mat McNerney and his “Death Magicians” have moved on from
their Dawnbearer debut and are taking their mystical folk music
into some pretty dark, haunting places and on trips that may (or may
not) have involved prolonged episodes of mushroom-munching.

There’s still a strong acoustic folk vibe going on with big plays
coming from sax (“Woods To Conjure”), violin and piano (“Wilderness Is)
and even didgeridoo (“Elegy To Goyahkla”), but they also unveil moments
that will see you referencing black metal, and a decaying velocity that
wraps its outstretched arms around the genre of doom. The opening,
wildly self-indulgent, spoken passage outlining the glory of “Heaven And
Earth Magic” sets the more solemn tone whilst passages of crystal
clear, eulogising vocal plugged with stronger harmonies, particularly
noticable in “His Portal Tomb” set one in mind of the work of Neil
Hannon (The Divine Comedy). They are rich in melody and travel lightly
along a gentle cadence. Around them is layered the sort of music that
could be described as possessing a certain Beatles-y charm.

In and out of the subtle shades of potency, those that evoke the
music of Ihsahn and Opeth comes something else. Tracks like the
10-minute “His Portal Tomb” and the 13-minute “Unseen Sun” that see the
band happily ringing in the changes with warm, fuzzed guitar cracking
out those metallic elements. They, in turn, ignite the doom fuse for
those that didn’t even realise it was there all along. More twists await
in the form of the cabaret wake-up call of “Are You Coniferous?” and
the addictive, Levellers-esque ceremonial melodies of “Sacred Marriage”.

Ultimately, though, there is just so much music here that fails to
capture the heart in the same way that a small portion of the songs do.
It’s always a disappointment to hear so much falling short of hitting
the mark that the standard-bearers set. The opening groundwork, so
grindingly laid out, is just too weak to support the grit that the back
end of the album displays. There’s way too many pompous passages of
spoken word; poetic and thought-provoking, for sure, but completely
energy-sapping. The fact they’ve covered a track (“Your Head Is
Reeling”, one of the album’s better ones) by a band called Ultimate
Spinach speaks volumes about them. Hexvessel’s exploration of the
connective possibilities of their humble folk music is certainly
impressive and No Holier Temple is a definite step forward but they need to stop sucking the life out of their music.